The efficiency and effectiveness of certain medical procedures can be considerably enhanced if that portion, or those portions, of the patient's anatomy requiring treatment can be quickly and accurately positioned and comfortably supported during successive treatments. This need to be able accurately to position, and successively reposition, a portion of the patient's anatomy and then maintain it virtually motionless is exemplified by considering a series of radiation treatments. The radiation beam must be projected to an exact location, sometimes interiorly of the body. Such a radiation beam must be most accurate in order not to inflict damage to the tissues surrounding the area to be treated, and as a result there is little margin for error. Not only must the radiation beam be projected accurately toward a particular spot on the body surface, the body must also be precisely oriented to effect the required alignment of the radiation beam from the surface of the body to the interiorly located tissue being treated. Moreover, once the patient is positioned and aligned he, or she, must remain as reasonably motionless as possible. Radiation treatment generally requires repeated exposures over a period of several weeks. Thus, the difficulties are compounded without a template by which quickly and accurately to reposition and support the patient during successive treatments in exactly the same position initially determined.
One approach for making such a template has been to create a lasting impression by allowing foam simply to rise up around the patient and to cure as it has so risen. However, this results in a relatively poor template inasmuch as the foam often does not accurately conform to the side contours of the patient's anatomy.
A more sophisticated attempt has been to use mass produced forms which approximate selected portions of the human anatomy. A foam is poured into the form, the patient is specifically positioned within the form, and the foam rises around the contours of the patient and is restricted by the walls of the form.
Practical considerations permit such forms to be provided in only two sizes--pediatric and adult--but there is no other reasonable means by which to personalize the forms to the size of the various patients to be treated. Because of the sheer bulk of the individual forms, and the number of different forms required to accommodate the several portions of the anatomy for which a template might be needed it is not practical to make, and stock, each form in a plurality of sizes. But even if one had the vast storage space available to stock all the various forms in a wide variety of sizes, true customizing of the template to the exact parameters desired for all patients would still not be readily feasible.